I need some help lightening my load

Well you definitely need to scale down your front page according to firebug it’s over 600k. A few things that should help are making sure that your images are properly sized. If you can use smaller images when possible, also you could try placing fewer posts per page. Another thing that you could do is to run your CSS through an optimizer. I did my stylesheet and it saved of 5kb of bandwidth that will add up over time with many visitors.

Any recommends on CSS optimizers?

I like this one personally.
https://www.cleancss.com/
But there are many other ones.
https://www.google.com/search?q=css+optimizer&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS175US236

Just make sure that whenever you go to optimize your code that you only copy from below the tile info in the stylesheet ie the */ underneath the first few lines.

Thanks for the tips. I didn’t mention it in the original post, but the site in question is checkyourhud.com

like LuckyLester said, any CSS optimizer recomendations?

heh, you beat me to it – thanks

I’m still open to suggestions for new hosting – anyone getting in excess of 5k unique visitors per day using shared hosting?